Seminar

"Observing Black Holes from the Stratosphere"

Mayukh is currently a PhD candidate in Astronomy at Queen's University, Canada, working with Prof. Laura Fissel on the Balloon-borne VLBI Experiment (BVEX). His research focuses on developing balloon-borne radio telescopes for Very Long Baseline Interferometry.

Felix Thiel currently is a PhD student in the Department of Physics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario Canada and a member of the Balloon-borne VLBI Experiment (BVEX) collaboration under the supervision of Laura Fissel.

Dr. Margaret Buhariwalla (She/They) recently graduated with their PhD from St. Mary's University in 2025. Her research focuses on hot plasmas associated with actively accreting supermassive black holes. Margaret has a passion for (and several years of experience in) science communication and is particularly interested in sharing the human perspective on space science.

Emily Deibert is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Waterloo, where her research focuses on characterizing the atmospheres of ultra-hot Jupiters and other exoplanets. Prior to starting at Waterloo, Emily was a Gemini Science Fellow and NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Gemini South Observatory in La Serena, Chile, where she worked as a member of the instrument science team for the observatory's new high-resolution optical spectrograph, GHOST. Emily completed a PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics, and an undergraduate degree in Astronomy, English, and Mathematics, from the University of Toronto's St George campus. 

"Atmospheric compositions of hot Jupiters as tracers of planet formation history"

"The Mystery of Martian Methane and A Potential Solution"

Elisa Dong is a final year PhD candidate at York University researching planetary atmospheres trying to understand how and why things move from point A to point B, or don’t. Her favourite research question is, "what if?". She completed her BSc in Geophysics at the University of Waterloo, and an MSc at Western University. 

"Cluster Lensing in the Stage-IV Era"

Charlie Mpetha did his undergraduate at Lancaster University, then moved to a PhD in gravitational wave cosmology at the University of Edinburgh. Mid-way through his PhD, in 2023, he won a Leverhulme Study-Abroad scholarship to work at the WCA for a year with James Taylor on topics in cluster cosmology. Now, Charlie is in his first year as a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at Goddard, working on cluster science for the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope.

Charles-Édouard Boukaré’s research focuses on understanding the deep interior structure and evolution of rocky planets. His work lies at the intersection of earth and planetary sciences, computational fluid mechanics, mineral physics, and high-pressure chemistry.

Dr Carlos Garcia Garcia is a cosmologist working at the interface of data and theory to understand the nature of dark energy. He received his PhD in 2020 from the University of Barcelona and has spent the past five years as a Beecroft Fellow at the University of Oxford. Carlos is active in the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Dark Energy Science Collaboration, where he has held different leadership roles, most recently serving as co-convener of the Weak Lensing and Large-Scale Structure working group. He is also a member of Euclid.

Jamie McCullough is a postdoctoral researcher in observational cosmology at Princeton University, using the measurements of galaxy shapes to trace the large-scale structure of the universe and the growth of that structure with cosmic time.

"Do Nearby Habitable-World Candidates Have an Atmosphere?"

Professor René Doyon’s research activities are focussed on the development of state-of-the-art astronomical instrumentation for various ground- and space-based observatories. He is also actively involved in various observational programs for detecting and characterizing brown dwarfs, exoplanets and young low-mass stars. Professor Doyon is the Director of the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets and the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic.